When you’re trying to start a business, it can be tough to figure out your next step. Daquan Oliver, founder and executive director at WeThrive, learned this from a young age, and now he works to develop entrepreneurial skills in students from middle school on up.

In this episode of Hacks and Flacks, Daquan shares a few lessons in social entrepreneurship and nonprofit marketing and communications. Having successfully built a national collective of undergrad mentors for youth in under-resourced communities, Daquan describes how informal mentorships have given him the support system to build his company.

He also explains why he chose to avoid media outreach at a certain point in WeThrive’s development, how press coverage gave him a boost at the right time, and how a few simple marketing and tech tools helped his business scale in a way that eludes many other nonprofit organizations.